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About this week’s chat

Peak hour traffic is terrible where I live. It takes me an hour to drive 20km. I rely on Maps on my iPhone to guide me to and through the least clogged routes to get home in the shortest possible time.

On the last day of work before holidays, I was on my phone the whole day. You know how it is: you have to tie up what feels like a thousand loose ends. On my way home, I noticed that my phone’s battery was down to 5 percent.

I’m slightly obsessed with phone chargers, so I have one in my car and another in my laptop bag. I also have chargers in the kitchen, my study and my bedroom! (Yes, I know… don’t roll your eyes.)

A Charger For all Occasions

When I noticed my phone’s battery was low and realised it had to guide me home through the traffic, I simply plugged it into the car charger – and it was able to do what I needed.

I’m not yet as good at recharging myself as I am at recharging my phone, although I’m much better than I used to be. For years I lived with the mindset that I’ll recharge if I have no choice left. Until then I’ll just keep going and going.

As you can imagine that mindset served my career well, but it didn’t serve my body as well. I ended up in a state of total burnout not once, but twice. (Not clever, I know.) However, now and again I’ll still push myself to almost unthinkable extremes to get done what I’ve committed to doing.

“3 Why’s”

Although it has become an important value in my life to recharge often and enough, it’s not my number one value. It’s more important to me that my word is my bond. Being totally trustworthy whether I’m rested or tired, is another value that tops recharging. Putting myself out there and creating my own opportunities to succeed is another that puts recharging on the back burner at times.

I need to add that I’m physically resilient, and I naturally have very high levels of energy. I also grew up with a mother who taught us that having energy is a function of the brain and a result of how we think. (Of course that’s open to debate, but that’s what she believed.)

She didn’t tolerate my sister and I telling her over and over how tired we were. If we said it once she heard us, believed us and expected us to deal with it. She believed if you keep on thinking about your tiredness it becomes worse.

Don’t Over-Focus on Self-Care

Something that I have difficulty dealing with is people who are so focused on self-care that they become self-absorbed. When it’s the thing you think of first regardless of circumstances or situations, it becomes selfish. Many great leaders, such as Nelson Mandela, could tell you about the necessity of self-care. He believed in taking care of himself.

Those same leaders could also tell you how crucial balance is. If they weren’t able to balance their needs with other demands on their time and energy, they wouldn’t have been the leaders they were. Although Mandela was big on self-care, he also believed that his own needs weren’t always paramount.

It’s all about balance. There are times when you can absolutely put yourself first, but there are times when you have to focus on a bigger cause, a routine duty, a looming deadline, or getting something done excellently (please don’t confuse excellence with perfectionism).

Recharge, Energize and Fill Your Bucket

In our Twitter poll this week we asked how full your “energy tank” is. Only 19 percent of you said that it was full most of the time.Click here to see all the options and the results.

In Friday’s chat, we’re going to discuss “Recharge, Energize and Fill Your Bucket.” We’d love you to participate in the chat, and the following questions may spark some thoughts in preparation for it:

When do you recognize that you need to recharge yourself?

How do your values inform your decisions about recharging/ the lack of recharging yourself?

What sorts of things help to energize you?

What are your top three biggest drains on your energy?

What fears may cause you to neglect recharging yourself?

How do your values inform your decisions about recharging/ the lack of recharging yourself?

How are energy and employee engagement connected?

What effect does personal energy have at work?

What can you do to boost your energy levels?

Resources

To help you prepare for the chat, we’ve compiled a list of resources for you to browse.

At Mind Tools we like hearing from people all over the globe. We’d like to learn from you too and we invite you to participate in the #MTtalk chat this Friday at 1pm EST (6pm GMT; 11:30pm IST). Remember, we feature great participant responses right here on our blog every week!

How to join

Follow us on Twitter to make sure you don’t miss out on any of the action this Friday! We’ll be tweeting out 10 questions during our hour-long chat. To participate in the chat, type #MTtalk in the Twitter search function. Then, click on “All Tweets” and you’ll be able to follow the live chat feed. You can join the chat by using the hash tag #MTtalk in your responses.